The writers I trust most are the ones with slightly bad taste.

Not bad taste in the sense of "no aesthetic sense." Bad taste in the sense of: they like one or two things they shouldn't, and they keep liking them, and they don't try to launder their preferences.

A writer with perfectly calibrated taste is harder to learn from. You don't know which of their opinions are theirs and which are imported. A writer who admits to liking a third-rate fantasy novel they read at fifteen, or to never quite finishing the canonical book everyone praises, is more useful. Their other recommendations have a different weight.

This applies to one's own writing too. The strongest essays of mine, looking back, are the ones where I committed to a slightly indefensible position rather than performing the more reasonable one. The reasonable ones read like book reports of other people's opinions.

Performed taste teaches the reader nothing about you, and so teaches them nothing about how to read your other recommendations.

Related: Notes on writing in public.

Comments

Comments are moderated. No email, no IP collection.